Archive for the ‘short stories’ Category
By
Simon Sellars •
May 2nd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Will Self, alternate worlds, celebrity culture, censorship, humour, pastiche, short stories
Is Woody Allen a Ballard fan? Lucy Vickery at The Spectator certainly is.
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 17th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Japan, manga, paranormal, short stories
Good old postmodernism. Here’s another claim about manga being influenced by an obscure Ballard story.
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 10th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, audio, short stories
“What kind of animals are being exhibited?” Ballard’s “The Recognition” is currently featuring on BBC Radio 7.
By
Dan O'Hara •
Mar 23rd, 2008 •
Category:
Freud, Germany, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shanghai, William Burroughs, archival, dystopia, film, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, short stories, surrealism, utopia
This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.
By
Simon Sellars •
Mar 8th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, alternate worlds, film, humour, medical procedure, psychiatry, reviews, short stories, the middle classes
In 1991 Simon Brook made a short film from J.G. Ballard’s obscure 1963 short story, ‘Minus One’. Enjoy this super-rare screening of Simon’s film.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 21st, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, short stories, visual art
Guardian columnist Jean Hannah Edelstein reviews the 12 Steps Down exhibition, based on J.G. Ballard’s short story, ‘The Drowned Giant’.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 10th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, short stories, visual art
News of a ’site-concerned work’ inspired by Ballard’s short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ and by ‘the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement’, with 25 artists invited to produce work around these themes.
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 30th, 2007 •
Category:
entropy, enviro-disaster, short stories, visual art
Here’s a selection of visual art that we’ve previously featured on this site, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work. See Part 1 for more recent discoveries.
Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord
Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Dec 28th, 2007 •
Category:
Australia, David Cronenberg, Lead Story, entropy, enviro-disaster, features, short stories, visual art
Here’s a selection of visual art I’ve recently come across, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work.
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 24th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, WWII, flying, paranormal, short stories, space relics
Ridgewell WWII Airfield: ‘Now little more than a collection of old huts, the area is haunted by the sounds of crashing WWII aeroplanes, shouting airmen, and other noises.’ (from paranormaldatabase.com).
Heuristic England is an interesting new blog exploring dreams, parapsychology, spectral presence, Freud, Jung … and Ballard. In a couple of recent posts, the blog’s convenor, […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jul 8th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film, short stories
+ Previously, students from Digital Media Design, St East Lancs, Institute of Higher Education at Blackburn College, gave us the title sequence created for a fictional movie based on JG Ballard’s ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.
Now they’ve come up with this, ‘a title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a short story by […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 28th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, body horror, celebrity culture, death of affect, film, media landscape, short stories, urban revolt
While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 24th, 2007 •
Category:
Philip K. Dick, alternate worlds, features, film, filmography, inner space, science fiction, short stories, space relics
‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 21st, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, film, short stories
Recently I directed your attention to Xander Walker’s no-budget adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s ultra-sardonic short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.
Now we have this, a ‘title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a novel by JG Ballard, ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.’ As part of this conceit, that ‘Virtual Death’ is actually a […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jun 2nd, 2007 •
Category:
Brian Eno, New Worlds, Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, William Burroughs, audio, entropy, interviews, science fiction, short stories
Interview by Simon Sellars.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled […]
By
Simon Sellars •
May 1st, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Chris Petit, William Burroughs, academia, architecture, film, psychogeography, psychopathology, short stories, surrealism, theme parks
+ CATALOGUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATROCITIES
Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism.
‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract
In this paper […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 24th, 2007 •
Category:
death of affect, film, invisible literature, media landscape, short stories, television
This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):
For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 5th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Shanghai, media landscape, politics, short stories
Left: Ballard’s author pic from the Varsity student newspaper (image & PDF courtesy Rick McGrath).
Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 8th, 2006 •
Category:
William Burroughs, bibliography, inner space, media landscape, medical procedure, sexual politics, short stories, speed & violence
OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”
For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 29th, 2006 •
Category:
Australia, Iain Sinclair, Shepperton, consumerism, dystopia, interviews, psychology, short stories, sport
Interview by Simon Sellars
JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have […]
By
Ben •
Sep 20th, 2006 •
Category:
Shanghai, consumerism, humour, interviews, psychology, short stories, surrealism, terrorism
JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 1st, 2006 •
Category:
New Worlds, Shepperton, WWII, advertising, architecture, bibliography, boredom, celebrity culture, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, dystopia, enviro-disaster, flying, humour, invisible literature, media landscape, medical procedure, photography, politics, psychogeography, psychology, science fiction, sexual politics, short stories, space relics, speed & violence, suicide, surrealism, television, terrorism, urban decay, urban revolt, visual art
OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).
From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; […]
By
Ballardian •
Jul 9th, 2006 •
Category:
archival, science fiction, short stories
by J.G. Ballard
Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that […]
By
Ballardian •
Jul 9th, 2006 •
Category:
archival, science fiction, short stories
by J.G. Ballard
Vermilion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like. It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day. Very few attempts have been made to visualize a unique and self-contained future that offers no warnings […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 9th, 2006 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, short stories, space relics
Now I’ve heard it all…
J.G. Ballard used to explain UFO sightings of the ‘Prophet Yahweh’…
So, I’ve seen the video, and this guy stands in a park in a city underneath some major military and commercial air traffic routes, and “summons” UFO’s.
Now, there is a short story by J. G. Ballard (”Empire of the Sun”, “Crash”, […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Aug 24th, 2005 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, short stories
From the Guardian: Wednesday August 24, 2005
"Keep it brief’: A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam
… [William] Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event-plot story", one of its earliest forms, […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Jul 31st, 2005 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, dystopia, film, politics, short stories
From the Londonist, July 18, 2005:
“We only just got around to seeing Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park - we figured we’ve waited for 35 years… what’s another week or so matter. Now we’re kicking ourselves for not getting along to the ICA sooner so we could recommend this to you guys earlier. We caught the […]